№ 71 (3221)

06.05.2006

It is hard to live in Russia, it is easy to die for it

In the days before holydays the market research company ROMIR-Monitoring made a research, people were asked: "Do you think that our land would win a war like the Great Patriotic War nowadays?" 53 percent of the respondents think that we would win.Just a little less than a half of them answered negatively.

And what does it mean "a war like the Great Patriotic War"? It means that we prepare for a war very long, spend the giant part of the budget for weapons and modernization of the army (making the people tighten the belts and applying imprisonment for truancy), we make education political – and we do it all for an inevitable but triumphant war "with small losses on the foreign land"?..

Doing it we destroy the command stuff of the army and declare our main enemy to be our main friend with a purpose to divide some foreign territory. Then, as this friend crosses the frontier (what is possible after dividing), we are retreating a long time loosing our blood... Then, after we have endured very much, we continue tolerating and move back – to take our land back... At least the Victory Flag appears on the den of the defeated enemy and one-legged soldiers and officers appear on our streets, left by their land as not wanted...

We would win this war – more than a half of the asked Russians believes. It cannot be any other war – not the "local operation for recreating peace on the North Caucasus" for instance! No, this war is too exhausting... We would better deal with a global threat!

It is interesting is that people in Russia were asked the same question a year ago. So now we can track the changes of the public opinion. To make everything clear let us remember how did this year look from the standpoint of patriotism. These are some data for the year 2005.

121 policemen died in Chechnya, 316 of native people are kidnapped and missing there. Neo-fascist (skinheads an so on) killed 26 people in Russia.

The official statistic of the Ministry of Defense says that 1067 people died not in battles (and 124 people more in the first months of the year 2006). Analytic report of the Parliament Assembly of the Council of Europe tells about thousands of deaths in the year 2005 in the armed forces of Russia (35 percent of them are suicides, 23 percent are results of "road accidents", 15 percent "results of physical violence", 11 percent are caused by illnesses and 10 percent do not have any reasons.

Here is another number to compare: in the spring the USA has counted its losses in Iraq. From the beginning of the war, during three years about 1700 people died there.

Is it enough? And now about changing in the patriotic optimism of Russian people. Comparing the results of two researches showed that during this year the number of people, who think that Russia would win a great war, increased by 5 percent!

This data corresponds with the result of another questioning: 66 percent of Russians find that life in Russia is getting more and more dangerous every year. Yet there is no paradox! It is hard to live in Russia, it is easy to die for it As the famous poet Joseph Brodskiy in his ode "For Zhukov’s death" said: "They were entering foreign cities without fear, yet they feared to come back in their own cities".

Marina YUDKEVICH.